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AI: Before we go much farther, let me back up a bit and ask you: when you were in high school, at some point, you made a decision that you were going to go on to college? Or how did that come about?

HM: There was never any question.

AI: You knew that you would be going on.

HM: I mean, it was like, certainly I was going to live to be twenty-one. Well, certainly I was going to go to college. What else was there to do?

AI: Well, the reason I ask is that my impression is that at, in that era, many girls were not expected to go on to college.

HM: That's true. But in my particular group, we were all going on to college, and it was just taken for granted.

AI: And so how did you decide where you might go?

HM: Well, I was considered very young by my parents. My mother was from Michigan, and she had friends living in East Lansing. So it was determined that I would go to Michigan State College so that my mother's friends could keep an eye on me. And I went to Michigan State when it was just formerly the Michigan Agricultural College. It still said MAC on the college smokestack, and there were fewer than three thousand. My goodness, when we hit three thousand as, when I was in the registrar's office, oh, we were a big school. And so I was at Michigan State in the early days, although the school itself was very old.

AI: Well, and so, tell me a little bit about the, your experience of your casework and how that affected you. You're still a relatively young person, but maybe seeing some families in difficult situations?

HM: Well... as I recall, my supervised casework was with the county welfare department. Now, this was in '32-33, pretty deep into the Depression. And I don't remember very much, except for two of my cases. And one was an older woman, and when I would arrive with her welfare check, and it was during her radio soap opera, she really would rather have watched her soap opera than get her money, and she was quite upset about that. And the other was a family where the mother, I guess, had been very badly abused so that her hip was around halfway to the front, and she had several girls. And she had bought a -- I believe it was a refrigerator -- and was paying something like a dollar a week. And by that figuring, she would have been paying for the rest of her life before she could hook up her refrigerator. So she decided she was going to make some money, and with this house full of girls, she was going to take in boarders which I didn't think was a very good idea. And that's about all I remember.

I had an excellent professor, who incidentally was the wife of (Philip) Schafer, who was the assistant director of Minidoka when I got there. And I had that much connection, although I didn't know him at all. And no, this was just more of what I'd been reading about all through high school and talking about... well, I didn't know that the social worker aunt was, first she lived in the East, when I was in Michigan, and then she was in California, so it was mostly through correspondence and recommended readings.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.